<Begin Segment 58>

TI: We have about thirty minutes left on this tape, so I'm going to kind of skip around a little bit.

HS: Yeah.

TI: But when you look at your career in plastic surgery, I know it was a long and illustrious career.

HS: Yeah, thirty-five years.

TI: But what are, what are a few of the highlights --

HS: Milestones?

TI: -- or achievements that --

HS: Well, the milestones in that, in '78, well, in '73, here we are in the middle of our residency program. By '70s, late '70s, I, Mac and I had decided that there's some new fields opening up in plastic surgery. One of those fields was microsurgery, that is joining very small vessels together using a microscope. So we decided we, we have to start developing that, that's going to become big in the future. And we sent one of our residents back to, to train with a fellow in San Francisco, a fellow by the name of Harry Bunke, who was, knew Mac from having trained in Montreal. He had trained in Canada, and his wife was French Canadian. So he was glad to take our resident, our chief resident, go there and train. Well, Gary came back, the day he came back was in July of 1973, 15th, he came back, I had lunch with him, and he said to me, "By the way, Henry, I have these sutures in my hand." These were the first what you call number 10 nylon sutures on little needles, you can't really see. You have to see them under a microscope. If you throw 'em up in the air, they'll just float. They were very fine sutures. He says, "You know, we could do some microsurgery if we have a case.

So I went back to the office (after) lunch. I go back to the office, am no sooner in the office than I get a call, about three o'clock in the afternoon, I get a call from a guy in the country, (a town called Rimby). He says, "I have a problem. There's a little girl here that got her arm cut off. Can we send her up, and you can do something for her?" I said, "Well, what did you do with the part that was cut off?" "Oh," he said, "the father was, had enough sense to grab it and bring it with him." I said, "Okay, do this and send her, send the kid up by ambulance." They got it up, and I organized a, immediately, we were, fortunately, everything worked in, you might call serendipity. We just happened to have an anesthetist that was available at a small hospital. Not the main university hospital. That hospital had been closed, the OR was closed because of air conditioning problems, and they're reconditioning the air conditioning, so the whole OR is closed. Gary I got a hold of, and he said, "Look, we can do it in emergency." I said, "No, we'll go to Charle Camsol," which was an Indian hospital, actually, a small hospital. I phoned over there, and they said, "Yeah, the anesthetist is just going out," and the girl's, Bailey said, I said, "By the way, we're gonna try and do microsurgery, and we're gonna try and join these fine little vessels together. Do you know what instruments we might need?" She said, "Yes, I do know." I said, "Well, how come you know?" She says, "Well, I did, in Australia when I was there, I had worked in the OR where the first replant was done in the commonwealth, and that was done a year ago."

TI: Oh, so this is, everything was coming together.

HS: Everything coming together. The anesthetist had been leaving, he came back he, she had to call him out of the parking lot and he came back and he says, "I'm available. Send the kid over. We'll get the OR set." So the kid comes in, I hear at three o'clock, the kid comes in, about four or five, by this time it's four or five o'clock. They had the OR ready by six o'clock. We did the operation, and we had the arm on by twelve o'clock. So from three to twelve, that's nine hours. That was the maximum time before your tissues begin to die. Well, we got this arm put together, and it survived. It was the first successful, functioning arm that was ever put together in North America. We did... you know, the university hospital, well, we were, it was the, Gary and myself were university-trained, we got the orthopedic surgeon, was also a university-trained person, but it was done at the, this Indian hospital, this aboriginal hospital. And we had help from residents and whatnot, but we got this arm going, it survived, not only it survived, it functioned. Every, every previous case, there was only one case previously that had been in Boston way back in the '50s. It had survived, but that was all. It was not functioning. They had tried one in Calgary, it deteriorated and became gangrenous.

TI: So even though they were doing microsurgery in other places, this was still the first time something this...

HS: First time. We beat everybody in North America. We're the first time in North America. They had done one in Australia a year before, they had done one in China of all places a year before that.

TI: And so you and Gary did this, so what were the role, what role did you play?

HS: I play in terms of, there's, it takes two people to do this. Somebody has to work on the arm that's cut off, that's what I worked on. Gary works on the arm that is still viable, and he knew that the, he had been with Harry Bunke, so he had learned how to put these vessels together, so I helped him put these vessels together. And then when the, like, nerves we could do. And the other thing, we only had a microscope that had one eyepiece. But the trouble was, the advantage I had, I was, with myopia, I could take my glasses off, and I could see the, see the vessels well enough to be of assistance, to get the things together. If you, you were not myopic, you couldn't do it without a microscope. But being myopic, I could do it with 'em. And so we were able to put these vessels together, the blood, at twelve o'clock, we let go of all the tourniquets and whatnot, our little clamps, and the arm pinked up, and we sat there just... that wasn't finished yet. We hadn't still finished, we just got the blood vessel going. And the important thing was not only getting the blood vessel, blood in, that was the big, big thing that everybody concentrated on, but the important part was to get the blood out, to do the veins. And that was, that's where it required someone who had training to get the blood, to get those little veins put together. So we put together two or three veins.

TI: The veins were probably harder because there was less pressure, less...

HS: Well, the veins were harder 'cause the vessels are very fragile. They're like, what we did, I had worked with, in the lab before that, I had done that in the, in the early '60s, putting veins together for kidney transplant things. And it was like the other guy used to say to me, "Henry, this is like Scotch mist, you can hardly see it." And it, and it just... but the veins doesn't have pressure, so you could hold onto the pressure, get the clot to form there so it wouldn't leak through. But then you didn't want it to clot, you had to continually use heparin, and then we got them on aspirin. This kid today is, got a functioning arm. Not fully functional, but she can do a number of things with her arm. Of course, she's a farmer's wife, and she's still living in Alberta.

TI: Wow, what a story.

HS: It was, it was, but it was a series of --

TI: To the family, that must have felt like a miracle.

HS: Oh, yeah, it was a miracle. I mean, we got a lot of press from this. But it was something that because we were the first to do it officially, not only, we could show the kid, and she had her arm, and it was, the blood was going through there. The nerves had been all cut, of course, it was completely off. I have pictures of it just sitting, arm was sitting in a bucket, put it back on. Anyhow, it worked, and that was one of, one of our big achievements there, milestones.

<End Segment 58> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.